April 10, 2011

Catholic Church abuse on Frontline

Mark Trahant Examines Catholic Church’s Abuse of Alaska Natives in FRONTLINE’s ‘The Silence’Writer and producer Tom Curran and reporter Mark Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock) will examine the Catholic Church’s abuse of Alaska Natives and American Indians by priests and church workers in Alaska in The Silence, a co-presentation with Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), airing as part of PBS FRONTLINE’s magazine show on Tuesday, April 19 at 9 p.m. EST.

The isolation of the Alaska Native villages and supreme authority of the Catholic church in the late 1960s and early 1970s allowed sexual abuse to slip through the cracks unreported. “It was a perfect storm for molestation,” said Anchorage attorney Ken Roosa, who represented the Alaska victims against the church.

Candid interviews with the survivors reveal the long-term emotional damage that lead to hundreds of abuse claims from one of the country’s hardest hit regions, according to a PBS press release.

“I was just a kid,” Ben Andrews told FRONTLINE of the ongoing abuse inflicted by Father George Endal and Joseph Lundowski, a layman who was training to be a deacon. “Father Endal and Joseph Lundowski, they couldn’t stop molesting me once they started. It was almost an everyday thing. Father Endal kept telling me that it would make me closer to God.”Comment: For more church crimes, see Churches Apologize for Betraying Gospel and Catholic Churches Apologize to Menominees.

As a native, it is one thing to be forced into conversion and be molested by a priest, which many native people experienced not only in the churches, but the boarding school system and the outright raping and violence that was done in the past and the continuing abuse towards native women today.

What I find even more shocking is that many non-natives raised in the churches for generations, now adults, were sexually abused as children and toddlers right under the parents noses.

And to add insult to injury, one famous case is where the Catholic Church re-assigned a bishop responsibly over a pedophile priest from California to Italy with former President Bush Jr. giving him immunity from prosecution.